Paris-on-the-Atlantic from the Old Regime to the Revolution

Abstract

Recent publications by economic historians have reinforced the impact of Atlantic Caribbean production upon France's soaring eighteenth-century economic expansion. Many topics concerning the French Atlantic have yet to be studied. This essay will explore one such question: the history of Paris as the social and economic capital of the first French Empire. The Atlantic dimension of the Parisian economy was of an entirely different order from ports directly involved in Atlantic commerce. Much wealth drawn from investments in the slave trade, as well as profits from commodities such as sugar, cotton, and coffee, were invested in prestigious Parisian real estate. This article explores the colonial dimensions of the remarkable boom in urban real estate in fashionable districts of Paris before and during the French Revolution. It draws on the history of Jean-Baptiste Hosten, a wealthy Saint Domingue planter and successful Parisian real estate speculator. It argues that we should reconsider both the investment strategies of colonial planters in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic and also whether the traditional narrative of planters meeting financial ruin after the Haitian Revolution fully stands up to scrutiny.